Winery Web Sites

May 17, 2013

The benefit is that it will enable Google to display your branding along with search results from your site. This is actually a fairly big deal, and a way to stand out from the crowd -- at least until every other winery is doing it, which (given the glacial pace of technological innovation in the wine biz) will be a while.

Pass this along to your webmaster. They'll know what to do with it. I expect the nice folks at Vin | 65 and eWinerySolutions are already on it.

July 04, 2012

I watched this 10-minute video on Search Engine Optimization (SEO) today, aimed at sites with less than 50 pages, which probably describes most winery websites. A very clear explanation of basic SEO for small sites.

February 06, 2012

A lot of wineries cite concern about the possibility of negative comments when asked why they are reluctant about using social media like Twitter and Facebook.

Here's a company in an industry which is easy to hate (insurance) that let's it all hang out on their Facebook page: Esurance. The comments are unmoderated, so you see complaints with praise. There are two things that make this page work in favor of Esurance: they actively participate in responding to customer comments, and they seem to care.

And yes, this takes time and effort on their part. Social media benefits are not free, or even cheap.

October 14, 2011

Love him or hate him, wine critic/blogger Steve Heimoff hits this particular nail on the head:

The biggest mistake most wineries make online is to establish a website, put some stuff up, and then let it molder for months if not years. I routinely get tasting samples in the mail ...So I’ll go to the website for info, only to find that the vintage hasn’t been updated for two years!... when you deliberately go to a website expecting something new and useful, only to find a bunch of old, boring stuff, it’s an insult. You actually feel resentment to the company for being lazy and uncaring and unprofessional. Not good.

The top error for winery websites remains a lack of freshness, from home pages which haven't changed in years, to a lack of information about new vintages, to "News" pages where the last update was more than a year ago.

A related mistake is to throw out the "old, boring stuff" on your website wholesale, instead of archiving items which have long-term value to visitors. Disk space is cheap and search engines are your friends. Someone just might want to read about that 10-year-old vintage they pulled from the cellar for tonight's party. Ideally, your website has information about every vintage you've every produced.

October 10, 2011

I will be part of a panel during the morning breakout session, Green Sales & Marketing: Communicating Green, along with Mimi Gatens, Laura Levy Shatkin, and Lisa Adams Walter. I am almost certain to offend someone with my take on wineries and their websites.

Please say hello if you're in attendance. Details on the event are here.

As I write this on Sunday morning, this story is the most-read news article on the Santa Rosa Press Democrat website.

BUT, not a single one of these wineries has the good news on their websites (either on the home page, or on the "news" page of their site). People are reading the news, searching for the winery on Google, visiting their home page, and finding...nothing.

(Update: as of 8AM Monday, 9/26, Wilson Winery has updated their home page.)

Consider the lost PR value of this oversight. It happens once a year -- you'd think people might plan for it. And yes, it's a weekend, but last time I looked, wineries are open for business on the weekends.

To their credit, Wilson Winery and Gloria Ferrer have updates on their respective Facebook pages (here and here), but unfortunately, these updates will only appear in the news streams of people who already Like them, and will disappear fairly quickly in the news stream.

September 22, 2011

Still not 100% sure about what SEO is? This quick video from Common Craft is a good introduction.

Of course, your chances of ranking highly for a general search phrase like Pinot Noir are low. But you probably want to rank highly for searches that associate your winery (e.g. Kosta Browne Pinot Noir) and/or region (e.g. Russian River Pinot Noir) with a particular varietal.

Another example: V. Sattui recognizes that they are a popular picnic spot, and has optimized their site for searches relating to winery picnic.

If you don't know the top 3-5 search terms that bring visitors to your winery, talk to your Webmaster. Then take a look for yourself at where your site appears in the results when you type those phrases into Google. If you're not happy with the outcome, it's time to tackle SEO for your winery website.

August 31, 2011

Lew Perdue has already taken Pepi to task for their website (article, website):

The Pepi site is quite possibly the worst winery web site ever.

But it's truly amazing to me that any professionally-managed web site has an internal link (i.e. one controlled by the winery itself) which generates a File Not Found (404) error.

So, I am amazed (as was Lew) to go to the Pepi site and get a 404 when I click on the Store Locator link. A link on the home page, not one hidden away somewhere. An important link if you want to actually buy some Pepi wine.

Jeez. You would think that checking for bad links is some sort of rocket science (Hint: it's not - Google's free Webmaster Tools will *tell* you if you have 404s on your site.)

Do you (or your Webmaster) run a regular check for bad links on your winery website?

If not, why?

(Looking at the Pepi News link on the site seems to indicate that the site hasn't been updated since 2009. So, not altogether surprising that it's broken. Anyone from Pepi out there want to comment?)

August 29, 2011

One of the biggest marketing errors I see wineries make is to promote something via AdWords or e-mail, and then direct people to their home page, rather than a landing page specifically tailored to convert the visitor.

I expect the reaction might have been more positive if they had donated all the money to charity (not just "making a donation from sales of this wine").

How does this pertain to winery websites? While there's a tiny announcement on the Lieb Family Cellars home page, it isn't linked to the page about the wines (or on the "Media Room" page, the other place you would expect to find it). Nope, it's buried two levels down under our wines and then Great Wines for Good Causes (and why is the wine "Great," but the cause only "Good?" Just sayin').

If you know (or hope) that a story (good or bad) about your wine is breaking, make the information you want people to see OBVIOUS.

August 15, 2011

Direct marketers (and wineries that successfully market direct-to-consumer) know that "it's all about the list."

Aside from new orders, your tasting room (if you have one), and events where you pour your wines, your website is the best source of new e-mail addresses for your list. So, why aren't you getting more (or any) signups from your website?

This visually-excellent article from the ElasticPath blog has one answer: the signup form for your list isn't getting enough love on your website. And they point out the value of testing its location as well.

August 12, 2011

Restaurant sites are the product of restaurant culture. These nightmarish websites were spawned by restaurateurs who mistakenly believe they can control the online world the same way they lord over a restaurant.

Substitute winery for restaurant and you're there. The wine business, in general, is about things being "just so," from the blending of juice to the look of the label. There are a lot of recovering type-A people in the biz.

There are other factors at work, as this quote points out:

﻿﻿"Say you're a designer and you've got to demo a site you've spent two months creating," Bohan explains. "Your client is someone in their 50s who runs a restaurant but is not very in tune with technology. What's going to impress them more: Something with music and moving images, something that looks very fancy to someone who doesn't know about optimizing the Web for consumer use, or if you show them a bare-bones site that just lists all the information? I bet it would be the former—they would think it's great and money well spent."

which I think does a lot to explain why winery websites frequently fail to work well for visitors. And, as the article also points out, many designers get paid by the hour, so it's in their financial interest to create works of art, which may or may not meet the needs of visitors. (Hate mail from web designers in 3...2...1)

I understand the need for wineries to outsource their Web presence to third parties. It's just that the real measurement of a website -- its effectiveness in meeting the needs of visitors -- is (a) hard to measure, (b) not generally available for comparison, and (c) questioned by skeptical winery owners. So, important decisions about website design frequently come down to "Is it pretty?" or "Do I (the winery owner) like it?"

PS - If you missed Part I, it's here. Some possible fixes are here (including some great reader comments).

So, here are the first two things I would fix on any winery web site that's missing them. The first is easy, the second, not so much:

Install analytics. If you are trying to improve the performance (by whatever measure) of your website, you can't do it without some data. If you're not trying to improve, why are you reading this?

Make it trivially easy to make changes to your website. If not, it's almost a guarantee that it will become outdated. Also, it's vritually guaranteed you can't test changes in response to the data that analytics will bring.

If you've already got these covered, please leave a comment -- you deserve some recognition!

My experience is that these two items are missing on most winery websites, i.e. the 5,000+ wineries that fight for 10 percent of US wine sales. 90% of US wine, by volume, is sold by just 30 wineries. These "top 30" wineries can devote entire teams to making sure that their Web presence is instrumented and up-to-date (although that's certainly no guarantee).

Bonus: if you've already made the two fixes above, then the third fix is to make it glaringly obvious where and how people can buy your wine. My favorite example of this used to be Anderson's Conn Valley Vineyards, but unfortunately they seemed to have redesigned their website and dropped it (dumb!). Basically, you want site visitors to easily find out:

how to buy your wines direct (online, as part of a club, by phone, by fax, or at the winery)

what stores carry your wine,

what restaurants serve your wine, and even

other outlets that carry your wine (e.g. K&L, wine.com, etc.)

Yes, it's hard to list the specifc stores and restaurants, but the better the job you do at this, the more avenues you create for potential customers to try your wine. And yes, you'd like to get the direct sale, but maybe someone is looking for a wine that you no longer have available. Piss them off, or point them somewhere that can make them a happy camper? The choice is yours, and it speaks directly to your focus on making customers happy.

Note to cult wineries: even if people can't buy your wine, it doesn't hurt to explain that clearly and politely. Unless, of course, you just want to make people feel bad for not being "in the know."

July 27, 2011

90-95% of winery websites stink because they say little about the winery and even less about the wines. They provide largely generic information rather than specific information about who you are and what differentiates your winery.

The post also points out that most winery websites aren't up-to-date, something I've mentioned before.

The comments (36 at last count) are interesting. Someone points out that the Washington Wine Report website ain't all that great either, which may be true, but is irrelevant to the author's point. What prevents most wineries, regardless of size, from having an attractive, distinctive site which meets the needs of visitors?

One commenter (JJ) had this thoughtful contribution, which is worth quoting:

Many of the real small wineries simply do not have the time or money to spend on getting every last detail on their website. With web-development costs often into the triple-digits per hour, you can see how the average startup might take a bare-bones and minimally updated approach, particularly if they make more than a handful of wines. Bloggers are by design the generators of their own content, but oftentimes winery folks do not have the skills and/or means necessary to generate meaningful content, which means they’ve got to pay someone else to do it. You’ve got to sell wine in order to pay for things like a website, but without a nice website it’s harder to sell wine. It's obviously a conundrum, and I'm sure that many winemakers put off spending all of that time and money out of frustration that they have to spend so much time and money to make it happen. Perhaps it's not the savviest decision, but it's certainly a reality in the industry.

And yet somehow, some (small) wineries *do* have nice websites. What's their secret? Inquiring minds want to know, so leave a comment...

PS - the person holding their nose in the picture is not Sean P. Sullivan.

July 26, 2011

I felt a little silly about having posted yesterday about A/B testing results for wine products, because I'm pretty sure that most wineries (since most wineries are small wineries) aren't doing A/B testing.

Number one reason? They have no idea how to do it. Followed closely by "no time to do it."

Serendipitously, this post from CopyBlogger showed up the same day: Why Split-Testing is Like Sex in High School. Despite the headline, it's a nice little tutorial on split (or A/B) testing. If your website is based on Wordpress, there's even a handy tool to help you.

In order to do A/B testing, you need some way to measure things. So, the first step is to make sure you have some sort of analytics package installed on your website. Google Analytics is free and more than overkill for most winery websites.

What's the first page on your website you should A/B test? Probably the most popular page on your site, where you should be trying to lower the bounce rate. Again, you'll need some sort of measurement tool to tell which page that is.

Got questions about A/B testing or Google Analytics? Leave a comment, and I'll do my best to answer it.

July 25, 2011

Many of you know about A/B testing on websites: showing one of two versions (A and B) of a given page to visitors, and seeing which one generates a better result.

The ElasticPath e-commerce blog, GetElastic (recommended), has a nice post about A/B testing for wine, complete with a real-life example of a wine product page. The results are, to say the least, interesting (and counter-intuitive).

We'd all like to think we know best when it comes to what appeals to website visitors (and, in my experience, wineries are particularly guilty in this regard), but testing reveals the (sometimes surprising) truth about what drives visitors to take action.

If you have an A/B testing story to share, please do so in the comments.

This is pretty effusive praise from Jason. which intrigued me. So, I wrote to Kimberly Jackson, who along with her brother Trent, owns the winery and asked. She told me that it was designed by Nicholas Masias.

I also asked Jason what he liked so much about it:

What's not to like?

It's very easy to figure out where to get their wines, both online and in restaurants.

It focuses on the bottle/label, helping you to identify the wine "in the wild".

They show the bottle in an "active" state- the cork is open, some of it has been drunk, there are cookies next to it - as if you've already engaged with the bottle.

It's memorable, and unique, and beautifully laid out. Bonehead simple, airy and open. It looks like no other wine site I'm aware of.

Contact information is easily found.

I mostly agree, except for #5 (you have to scroll down to the very bottom to find the contact information, which IMHO should be at the top of the page for quick reference when using the Web as a phone book).

July 01, 2011

I hate this phrase: Zero-Moment of Truth (ZMOT). It's advertising-speak of the worst sort.

On the other hand, I love this quote:

When consumers hear about a product today, their first reaction is ‘Let me search online for it.’And so they go on a journey of discovery: about a product, a service, an issue, an opportunity...

which aptly summarizes the challenge facing wineries (and lots of other businesses as well) today.

Google is promoting a free 75-page ebook called, not suprisingly, The Zero Moment of Truth, which you can download as a PDF. Chapters 1 (Changing the Rulebook), 2 (The New Mental Model), and 6 (How to Win at ZMOT) are the most useful, but it's a quick read (you can safely skip the foreword, though).

Chapter 6 offers 7 steps for "winning at ZMOT" (another cringe-worthy phrase), which I hope will entice you to take a look at the details:

Put Someone in Charge

Find Your Zero Moments

Answer the Questions People Are Asking

Optimize for ZMOT

Be Fast

Don’t Forget Video

Jump In!

Smart winery marketers will download a copy of this book and think deeply about how it applies to selling more of their wines. The rest of you can proceed with business-as-usual.

June 30, 2011

So, let’s go back to 1998. You’re a new writerwinery and you want to establish a permanent residency online. Which would be wiser: Having your own site at your own domain, or putting up a site at GeoCities?

It's easy to get caught up in the swirl of excitement around Facebook, but your winery website is still the anchor for your online presence because you control it.

November 04, 2010

You would think the answer is "Of course!" After all, you pay good money to smart designers to make sure it does.

So, I was nearly incredulous when I discovered that the Clos du Val website didn't work properly in either Chrome or Firefox.

It works fine in Internet Explorer (IE), though.

Here are the screen shots (click the thumbnail to see full size).

Chrome (menu is visually busted, although it does "work"):

Firefox (menu is not visible at all, which means you can't navigate):

Internet Explorer 8 (why do people think there's a problem?):

Nowadays, it's quite easy to install all three browsers on your system (unlike the old days, when IE seemed to go out of its way to make other browsers malfunction), so even if your web designer says everything works, you can (and should) check for yourself.

The moral of the story is "trust but verify." I'm sure Clos du Val has been happily thinking that everything is fine with their website. In reality, somewhere between 20 and 50 percent of their visitors aren't able to access it as intended.

August 06, 2010

If the person who answers your phone isn't completely familiar with your winery website, they should be.

Otherwise, how are they going to help someone who needs help with the website?

For example, today I called a business because the event schedule on their website was out of date. When I mentioned that fact to them, they said "Gosh, it is? I'll let someone know." I'm not real confident of a fix, because the person I mentioned it to on the phone clearly has no way to see if the problem gets fixed (assuming that they are interested in such things to begin with).

I don't expect anyone in a small winery to be sitting at a desk waiting for the phone to ring, but when it does, they should have a computer with access to the Web sitting in front of them.

As a manager or owner, you should be visiting your Web site on a weekly or monthly basis, at the very least, to make sure you're happy with what your visitors are experiencing. It's easy -- just add a repeating event to your calendar.

July 24, 2010

...here’s my beef. I’m SO TIRED of people in EVERY ASPECT of the wine industry automatically handcuffing wine to media and branding that has been used for the last 40 YEARS. If you want new consumers then you have to do something new.

This captures exactly my rant about "yet another winery website with a picture of a vineyard." Not that I'm opposed to pictures of your vineyard, but (a) for most people, one vineyard looks pretty much like another (just like wine labels), and (b) everybody else is doing it. At least use a *distinctive* picture of your vineyard (to check if it's distinctive, ask yourself if someone looking at the picture alone could tell it was your vineyard -- you see my point).

Wine is a traditional product. I think it's still hard for consumers to give up corks. Can you imagine the uproar if wineries tried different packaging (even it were more imaginative than a damn cardboard box)? So, some things we're sorta stuck with.

July 06, 2010

I occasionally rant about how most wineries seem to look and sound alike. You know, the whole "picture of a vineyard on the home page" thing.

This post from Naomi Dunford is a great explanation of why you should make an effort to do something different from every other seller of fermented grape juice. Basically, because your brain is designed to attenuate repetitive stimuli. We tune things out.

Consider this commercial. It's so effective because you've never seen anything like it before.

There's now a sequel, which is still fun, but less effective because it's the second one.

June 01, 2010

...for most growing businesses who have a limited budget, focusing on a well-designed website and e-mail marketing are the essential elements they should focus on, before diving too deep into social media.

Just make sure that (a) your website is easy to change, and (b) let a professional (e.g. Constant Contact, AWeber) handle the mechanics of running a e-mail list.

May 14, 2010

What happened in December of 2009? The company involved started to make changes in their Web site, one at a time, measuring the changes.

Notice that I didn't say "they redesigned their entire Web site." And it was pretty horrible to start (and it's still no prize, in my opinion).

They just started with a pretty horrible design, and started removing the "rocks" that impeded customers from making a purchase. Turns out, they didn't have to remove too many.

You can read the full story here. If your site gets at least 50 visitors a day (which may be the first problem you need to solve), you can get the same treatment (for a price).

I apologize that this story isn't about a winery Web site, since that's what you come here to read about. But I think it's valuable because it talks about incremental changes guided by measurement, which applies to your winery Web site as much as it does to a site selling The Amazing Bible Timeline.

May 12, 2010

Here, with minor edits, is the opening paragraph of an e-mail I received from a winery today:

Dear [redacted] Customers,

We’ve decided to re-send last week’s e-mail announcing the release of two new [redacted] wines, since many of our customers encountered difficulty in placing their orders on our website. We have since learned that our website vendor was having serious server problems that prevented some of our customers from completing their orders (other orders were placed successfully). Over the week-end, the problems were fixed and the ordering system is now in [sic] working. We apologize for any inconvenience and appreciate your e-mails, alerting us to these problems.

First of all, breathe a sigh of relief that this wasn't your winery.

What would have happened if some frustrated customer hadn't sent them an e-mail? They might still have a broken e-commerce site. They might be wondering why that e-mail offer they sent isn't generating as many orders as usual.

I could be cynical and assume that this is just a way of sending another e-mail blast to get people to take action. But I'm not. I feel sorry for whatever revenue this winery lost (my understanding is that they are, like many wineries, trying to move slow-selling products). I suspect it also had some impact on their customer's perceptions as well.

I took a moment to look up the IP address for the winery's Web site (they host their own e-commerce solution). Doing a lookup through ARIN (the entity which assigns blocks of IP addresses for the US), I could see that their IP address belongs to their Web host, Bay Area Network Systems. Presumably, that's where the problem occurred, although it's hard to tell from the winery's description.

What can you do to ensure that you won't experience the same breakdown? Ideally, you have a way to place an order (from outside your own network) that flows all the way through the system and shows up as received. That's the only way to really be sure. And even then, as the letter above shows, that's not a guarantee that it's working for everyone.

If you're like most wineries, where Web sales aren't all that important to the bottom line, you probably don't care. But if you're doing significant revenue via your Web site, you should be asking yourself, "How do I know that my e-commerce site is actually working?"

Go, take the test, and be sure to sign up for her weekly newsletter/reminder. It's fun (and educational) to see if you can pick the winner each week, and I'm sure it will give you some ideas for improving pages on your winery Web site.

Lots of people use WordPress as a content management system (CMS). It's a great tool, has an active user community, and it's free.

You can use it to run your blog or your whole Web site. You can use it as a free hosted service at WordPress.com (with some limitations), or run the software yourself (many Web hosts offer it pre-installed as part of a hosting package). One thing, though, is you still kinda need to read the manual if you want to maximize its value as a tool for marketing your winery and wines.

I was reminded of this while looking at Wine Industry Insight. The "permalink" (URL) of a post at wineindustryinsight.com looks like this:

http://wineindustryinsight.com/?p=10476

This is the default, and its format is a dead giveaway that WordPress is in use.

A better format for this permalink, one which could increase the search engine ranking for this post, might be something like:

One thing to watch out for: if you change the permalinks for existing posts, you need to create permanent redirects (HTTP 301s) for the old URLs if you want to preserve the current search engine rank/information about those pages.

This is why it's important to set up your permalinks correctly from the get-go.